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From the forging of a constitution for the postindependence republic to the reign of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party today, the idea of India as a nation-state has predominated. Yet the country encompasses a vast diversity of communities, regions, languages, and cultures, calling into question any unitary identity.
In this magisterial account of Indian politics over the past seventy-five years, the renowned scholar Partha Chatterjee challenges common notions of “state” and “nation,” arguing for a more capacious understanding of “the people.” He examines the varying trajectories of the Indian nation-state, as opposed to what he calls the “people-nation,” analyzing the complex connections between the two. Chatterjee offers a persuasive political-economic analysis of the transition from the time of developmental planning to the present era of capitalist dominance. He combines keen analysis of changing caste-class-gender formations in the country’s diverse regions with a close examination of the uneven spread of India’s capitalist economy.
By looking beyond the nation-state, this book unveils many hidden aspects of Indian politics today—and makes a powerful case for a future in which the federal system respects the equal worth of each part of the country.
— Pranab Bardhan, distinguished professor emeritus of economics, University of California, Berkeley
[For a Just Republic] combines huge breadth, striking analytical sharpness and a sustained focus on an absolutely key question in the politics of modern India and federal states across the world. In the present moment, it is a book that scholars and the serious general reader alike will want to reach for and to read.
— Rosalind O’Hanlon, professor emeritus of Indian history and culture, University of Oxford, Scroll
For a Just Republic is a summa that opens up a new world of just politics for the people-nation. Partha Chatterjee, the preeminent theorist of nation, offers a profound rethinking of democratic practice, with a vision of a just coalition politics stretching across region, language, culture, and even history. A theoretical and analytical masterpiece.
— Manan Ahmed Asif, professor of history, Columbia University
For a Just Republic is another brilliant chapter in Chatterjee’s exemplary political anatomy of India. Sovereign, centrist powers of the nation-state, he argues, ride roughshod over the regional rights of the nation-people whose “vernacular” lifeworlds resist being subjected to a homogenous and hortatory “idea” of India. This classic work of political philology touches the raw nerve of India’s dilemmas today, and yesterday: Are Indians fated to choose between “soft Hindutva and hard Hindutva”? Must “the largest democracy in the world" suffer long cycles of authoritarian misrule?
— Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
For a Just Republic is a book that arrives at a moment of crisis and speaks directly to it. It insists that another India — more just, more attentive to its own plurality — remains possible. Whether we have the political will to build it is another matter entirely.
— Amritesh Mukherjee
Partha Chatterjee’s new book will change the way we study Indian politics.... You cannot now write about Indian politics without reference to For a Just Republic. You cannot ask questions about Indian politics without keeping Chatterjee at the back of your mind. That is the hallmark of a great book.
— Yogendra Yadav
This book is a striking example of Partha Chatterjee’s inspiring style of building theory through granular histories and elements of contemporary politics.
— Nivedita Menon
Preface
1 The Nation-State and the People-Nation
Part I. The Nation-State
2 The Limits of Liberal Government
3 The Political Management of Capital Accumulation
4 Who Is an Indian Citizen?
5 Justice: Procedural and Substantive
Part II. The People-Nation
6 A Federation of Peoples
7 Rights of Minorities
8 Capital and the Regional Distribution of Power
9 Class, Caste, and Gender Justice
Bibliography
Index